


Late Exit

by ephemere



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: M/M, Multi, fontcest is also a perpetual flavor, nihilism is a flavor of the century, when life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-02
Updated: 2016-07-02
Packaged: 2018-07-19 15:39:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7367545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ephemere/pseuds/ephemere
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>You drop your gaze. Stare instead at your glass, the dregs still clinging to its bottom.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>Countless resets later, Sans drinks at a bar. He remembers far too much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Late Exit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Askellie (NadaNine)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NadaNine/gifts).



It's your usual, of course, slid over to you with the same regular efficiency you've witnessed -- commented on, with any number of terrible puns -- admired, openly or not -- quietly resented, all these myriad times. You take a gulp of practiced greed and imagine alcohol searing its way down your gullet. It doesn't. It never does, these days; you lost the capacity for intoxication -- it was taken from you -- a few resets after you stopped counting, but it's still useful to pretend.

This is what you know, after all. Above everything else: usefulness.

And so you end up here, night after star-stolen night, slipping out of the house despite your brother’s protests -- his exasperation -- his warnings and his frustration, the beginnings of what could be anger, tinged always (always and always and always) with unwavering affection. You end up here taking all the possible paths (through snow, through void, through shortcuts you wish you could forget and shortcuts you don’t remember making), and drink your way to another ending -- for all the good it will do -- while lamplight glints over canine muzzles and artless grins and the phalanges drumming against the bar’s carefully polished wood. 

You end here, or so you would like to think. Take another sip, for all that your drink’s absent of fire or taste. Again: it’s useful.

But fuck, you’re tired.

You remember: there were times when you belonged to things other than exhaustion. When you thought you could change the world, armed with your knowledge and your magic and your unrelenting desire to protect, to _save_ ; when you fought for your brother, driven by the memory of the light in his smile, your need to see him again so you could relearn how to breathe; when you tracked a child down in the snow and broke promise after promise as you sank a sharpened bone between their ribs and watched their blood fount crimson out of a mouth half-open on-- bewilderment? surprise?-- back when you thought it mattered, when you thought endings existed. Those days hope possessed you, hope wild-eyed as it teetered on the razor edge of fear, grinning a death’s head grin while you destroyed a child again. And again. And again. It lied, you see. It told you that you could live. No: more vitally, it told you your brother could live.

Heh. You laugh a little; Grillby turns fractionally towards you, flames beginning to flicker in a question, but he soon subsides when you form your best facsimile of a smile and shrug. A thousand times he’s done this. A thousand times again he’ll do it, the gesture unchanged, as deathless as hope and just as false.

If hope were a currency you’d be bankrupt and laughing at others hurrying to spend it without knowing it was worth less than dust. Laugh now. Choke it down. After hope came the despair, hurling its brighter sibling off a cliff-edge and watching dull-eyed as it shattered into fragments of tarnished gold. These days you tell yourself you should’ve figured it would come so quickly. After one lie: here’s another, even more cruel.

“Top me up, Grillbz.”

You tip the entire glass down your throat. It tastes like nothing. What else were you expecting? You haven’t tasted anything through more universes than you can remember.

For despair was bitter -- _bitter_ \-- hah, it was poison in your mouth and ashes on your tongue, and it erased all sensation from your mouth, stole taste as it slipped down your throat and made its home in your ribs. Still you held on to it as if your bones could burrow into it and make it part of you so that you never had to let it go. Those nights you seized everything you’d ever wanted in some twisted expression of desire, because the world was ending, you were all dead anyway, and nothing, nothing mattered except this moment: bones scraping against each other in an intaglio of urgent, writhing limbs; Papyrus moaning, gasping your name, squeezing his eyesockets shut as he came; and oh you’d die for the way he trembled and shuddered and fell apart under your hands, his soul pulsing so bright it seemed nothing could ever extinguish it. How the world dissolved when you were with him, and (nothing meant anything) because he was here, with you, under you on top of you all around you _in you_ , and this, this was real, this remained--

How the next month (the next week the next day the next waking hour) he was only dust and a sodden red scrap trampled into muddy snow.

This is what you told yourself, on your knees gripping your dead brother’s scarf:

Despair was easy. Despair soothed you, its lies swarming carrion between its smiling teeth. You grasped for everything you could, urgent, frantic, needing something -- anything -- because what did it matter? --everyone would forget that you once curled your fingers inside them and made them beg for more; that your conjured tongue laved their souls with an obscene, meticulous worship as your magic pulsed and crackled in cyan webs all around you, wanting ( _always_ ) more.

You lost it all. Once you'd thought it might save you. Maybe desire could make existence bearable. Maybe living intensely could erase the futility of this unlife, reset after reset, replaying old lines grown eerie in their strangeness, the patterns of ennui, that same painful precision each time.

Stupid.

It didn’t matter. Nothing did. And in the end: there was only dust, and you in that corridor crisscrossed by golden shafts of light, watching a face furrowed with the red lines of massacre, eyes on that careless hand holding a worn knife. And all those firework moments of bone and climax and Papyrus (Toriel Undyne Alphys Doggo Asgore Dogamy Dogaressa Mettaton) shrieking your name, telling you _yes yes yes_ ; all that light and conflagration of souls and pleasure and grit and sweat and what you told yourself was salvation-- it turned into their dust in your mouth as you stood there, and there was nothing you could do but fit the old smiling mask over your face and warn a mass murderer about _bad times_ \--

You should have screamed. But it wouldn’t have mattered.

Another drink. Do you need more? You’ve always needed more. Here it is at your elbow. Take it up; run your thumb over the glass rim. Tell yourself: nothing you did would have made any difference.

You can sigh if you want. Exhale your exhaustion into the warm air of Grillby’s bar, but not so loud he looks at you again. Try to forget, until another false end comes -- that would be useful.

Funny, isn’t it? For all your so-called mastery of practicality you’re sitting here remembering instead, as if memory could carve itself deeper into your bones. Running your mind over the image of Papyrus, burnt orange hazing his cheekbones, sprawled out beneath you in a mess of shivering spine and heaving ribcage, his tight-wound energy completely unraveled by each soul-deep thrust. Going back to it, over and over, as one worries at a festering wound, turning the wound into a scar and the scar into a brand.

He’s seared into you, sunk into your marrow. You remember details with a tortured clarity you cherish and at the same time condemn.

For instance: universe after universe, Papyrus would be endearingly, arousingly, maddeningly vocal, his pleasure at the thousand caresses you lavished on him finding expression in his voice, yelling your name, endearments, encouragements, demands you loved to satisfy. He could never be quiet. You’d drive him to the edge again and again, until he screamed himself hoarse, voice gone raw from climax and overwhelm. Sex with him was always an exercise in excess, in slowly dimming marvel at the bounty of it; in the generosity of bone scraping over bone, femurs spread as wide as joints would allow; in the reckless stretch of patella and tibia hooking over Papyrus’s shoulder _just so_ ; in fucking each other breathless, intoxicated, giddy with the sheer perfect impossibility of your bodies writhing together towards the crest of a dazzling heat that annihilated everything outside the collision of your desires.

Look at you. Pathetic. At least these days you can think of fucking him without embarrassing yourself by showing telltale signs of arousal. Your brother’s dust took a little more of your capacity for desire every time you saw it, each time you fell to your knees in dirty snow. Did you really think you could keep something of passion, even the tiniest spark? It’s been consumed, all of it. Ground out of your bones.

You think of the jutting curve of Papyrus’s pubis, that distinctive flare of bone as you ran your fingers down his spine and over his ilum, and you feel nothing, not even the slightest flicker.

What’s left? Do you know? Drown your shudder in a drink-- your fourth? fifth? figures this reset’s Grillby possesses all of his old selves’ attention to detail; you hardly notice yours silently refilling itself. Tip liquid down your throat. Don’t close your eyes.

Listen, you’re past hope, past despair. These days you’re only tired. If you were sensible -- if you truly understood usefulness -- you’d have found a way to escape this twisted game, gotten out of this loop in the cycle through one shortcut or another, no matter how horrible the path, no matter how dire the cost. Anything to make it stop. Even for just one round of resets.

You’ve tried. For a moment, your phalanges still around your glass, and amber liquid reflects pinpricks of light amid eyesockets that have gone so very, very dark. The bar’s ambient noise recedes; a high-pitched whine swallows cheerfully rowdy conversations. You’ve tried, and to your shame.

_(for dust, and dust, and dust, and that blood-stained smile at the end)_

You shake your head to clear it. All those times you came close you’d never been able to go through with it. Hope would say there was something to keep going for; despair would retort, smiling slyly, that you simply haven’t found the right way to do it, but it’s an inevitable end in a world drained dry of all meaning.

Fear says nothing, only looks at you. You drop your gaze. Stare instead at your glass, the dregs still clinging to its bottom.

You know the continuation of resets has never been guaranteed -- hell, _nothing_ ’s guaranteed in this awful excuse for a universe that’s trapped you and everyone you profess to love. The Underground is made of lies and shadows cobbled together with dirt and the stink of decaying golden flowers that have drunk deep of blood. There’s nothing certain. Least of all that the resets will continue.

And it’s this uncertainty that traps you here. What if this is the last of the resets -- what if you decide to make an exit now, of all times, when the universe will finally persist, accept the holes you and that kid have punched in the world, try to feign some measure of permanence?

What if you left this world to spare yourself a few more months of pain -- and left Papyrus to go through the rest of it alone?

So you stutter on your penultimate breath -- and hesitate -- and choke down all thoughts of sparing yourself even a day’s worth of pain. What’s a lifetime of hopelessness when you’ve lived through thousands?

You hear a soft, crystalline creak: the unmistakable sound of cracks splintering through glass. You’re gripping your drink hard enough to threaten to break its vessel -- you, with your 1 HP and your fragile constitution. Heh. You manufacture a grin and slap it onto your face just as Grillby turns, one nigh-indistinguishable eyebrow raised. Most people find it difficult to read Grillby’s expressions -- fire’s just fire, they giggle when drink has loosed their tongues. You’ve learned to recognize his moods, though, to distinguish each expression amidst flicker of flame and crackle of heat. How could you not? You’ve sat at his bar thousands of times, nursing your drink with only the flame elemental for company, bringing out pun after unspeakable pun in response to his dry, sardonic, quietly-worded observations. This one he’s wearing right now-- it isn’t just curiosity. It’s concern, shaded with something almost… possessive? A claiming. A familiarity.

If you were still capable of it, you’d wonder if you’re drunk. Grillby’s never been particularly attached to you, never showed any more interest in you than would be expected of a bar owner with regard to his most loyal (and indebted) patron. What is it, then? --but you wipe the thought away from your mind. Turn your attention again to your drinking. Right. Drink.

Because that’s what is left to you. Endure. Grit your teeth and pretend that it’s a smile. Go through the motions, stumble your sleepwalker’s way through life -- until, once again, with that horrible inevitability that has nausea churning through sternum and skull, people start dying. Acquaintances, first, or maybe monsters you barely know. And then, one by one--

Alcohol sputters down your hyoid, recoils, splatters out through your nasal cavity. Your sheepish look isn’t entirely feigned, this time. You should know better.

\--besides. You’ve tried everything, and you couldn’t save even a single one of them. You’ve tried to escape, and found somehow that you couldn’t, that thousands of resets hadn’t entirely worn away your need to cling to existence if only for the sake of your brother. You’ve--

Hilarious: an eternity of late exits, of failed saves, by the only guy who knows what’s going on. Fuck this. _Fuck it,_ and this time you raise your hand -- clenched into a fist, well, that’s pretty fitting isn’t it -- to smash your glass down on the bar, only to find it plucked away from you by a blur of orange and red.

Right. Your eyes slowly focus on Grillby’s hand, then his face. If you concentrate, he isn’t just a blur of blazing colors, too warm and too bright. If you concentrate, you can see _him_ \-- not some faceless pile of dust, not dust heaped upon itself all throughout Snowdin and Hotland in unnumbered piles of the underground’s dead, and--

“Sans?”

It takes you longer than it should to form a reply. “Just swallowed the wrong way there,” you say. “No need to look so sternum.”

That’s when you notice the quiet, the empty tables, the shadows over the rest of the bar where Grillby’s turned out the lights. Yep. Right. Closing time. You should make the same non-apology you always do, maybe spice it up a bit with a new pun about flames and the way their light gleams deep red along his glasses’ frames--

Grillby says nothing, only stands there, watching you, holding your empty glass in one hand of flame, and you think--

\--you don’t know, exactly, why you never fucked him even in those days of sharpest despair, when you needed to lose yourself with anyone, everyone; why? He was right there, you probably could’ve persuaded him, could still persuade him now; but even as the ghost of want flickers through you it disappears, dissolving in something you can’t describe, and--

\--you’ve never seen his eyes, have you? Does it matter? Nothing matters, but strange that you haven’t, iteration after iteration; strange that after having lived and died through countless worlds where everything is the same, everything is empty and doomed and all too deeply known, suddenly this question; it’s strange, strange--

Finally, he says, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Fuck no. Yes. Yes. Yes, please, yes, it’s killing you, it’s killed you countless times in the past, it will kill you again, and you just want-- you just want--

For a moment that has your ribs clenching around the aborted manifestation of a jaded soul, you wonder what he’d say if you told him. You think you can. Or at the very least you’ll reach out and snatch at this chance of refuge offered, the brief respite, grasp it readily because he’s always been there, steadfast and silent, seeing everything and judging nothing, and maybe that kindness carries a strength you can borrow. Maybe his fire can drive away fear, can warm you through the numbness and dread of knowing of the world’s ending, maybe heat and light can cut through the exhaustion. Even for just a night.

But then the chance shatters. It’s lost, gone into that nameless graveyard all your failures go. As the fractured possibilities dissipate into void you offer him a paltry substitute: a grimace you didn’t have to contrive. A smile as a monster on the edge of falling smiles: that wince, that thready gasp for air.

“I’ll be fine,” you say. “You know me.” You could talk about femur-liarity. You don’t.

“That’s right,” he says. He’s speaking quietly, though he doesn’t need to. No one’s here to overhear. His voice, a part of you notes almost distantly, could be made of embers: soft and deep as night, overlaid by the quiet crackle of a dying fire. “I do.”

It’s neither a challenge nor a question. Not even an outright statement that he recognizes (as he must) the lie stuck between your teeth, the grinning mask that has slipped tonight of all nights, here in this place where you end up, again and again, to exorcise -- avenge -- embrace your ghosts. You think -- with growing, unfamiliar bewilderment -- it could almost be an invitation. A promise.

It’s a shame you don’t deal well with promises.

You tuck your smile away, lean over so the shadows hide your expression. Reach out as if to pat the hand he’s still got wrapped around your glass, the tips of your phalanges barely grazing the luminous tongues of his flames.

“Good old Grillbz,” you say.

You mean it, and a shudder goes through you that you struggle to suppress. No. Don’t even go there. Meaning isn’t useful, isn’t expedient, isn’t necessary. It’s another risk, and you’re weary of risk, the complications and the inescapable futility of it all, the way it takes the inherent unfairness of all these damn resets and the deaths you can never prevent and stabs you in the gut with the sum of your failures. You didn’t need this -- didn’t need Grillby offering you his silence and his regard when he should have just shoved you out the door or demanded you pay this iteration’s tab. He shouldn’t have bothered to even ask. Shouldn’t have tried to complicate your shitty life when all you wanted was some time to escape this shitty resetting world. Something that might be anger rises in your throat.

You’re just so fucking tired.

You’re hardly aware of sliding off the bar stool and heading to the exit; it feels like you just blinked your way to the door. You’re about to step outside when Grillby’s hand on your shoulder gives you pause -- and you turn, the anger flaring white-hot within you--

\--and dying, to be swallowed up by something that might be astonishment, might be disbelief. Grillby’s holding out a coat, and as you stare at him in a rictus of _huh, what the fucking fuck_ he leans forward and drapes it over your shoulders, moving so efficiently you might almost mistake this for a business transaction.

Except it’s not. Or it is. Fuck, you don’t know what this is. This never happens. It’s not meant to, and it can’t.

Grillby fastens the buttons around your neck to secure the coat snugly around you. “It’s cold outside tonight,” he says, matter-of-fact. 

You stare at him and, with effort, form a grin that you know must look all too false. “Thanks,” you say in the end, turning to go.

“Take care, Sans,” he says.

Pretend you don’t hear him. It’s useful. Slip your way out the door, false grin still plastered on your face. Pretend this isn’t yet another escape. Pretend you didn’t stay too late. Pretend it’s not snowing; pretend the coat doesn’t shield you from the flakes, pretend it was an empty gesture because you don’t care if the cold wraps its brittle severity around your bones.

Walk your way home, disappearing again into the cold and quiet dark.

**Author's Note:**

> For my beloved [Askellie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/NadaNine/pseuds/Askellie), extraordinary writer of sensual, brilliant fiction; with much thanks to Mangobinky for that amazing sternum pun (total lifesaver!).


End file.
